Item 2: Dealership conglomerate RLJ is owned by Democrat bigwigs Mack McLarty and Robert Johnson. RLJ magically happened to keep all six (6) of their dealerships while its competitors were shuttered. McLarty is a former Clinton chief-of-staff and Robert Johnson (founder of BET) is a major Democrat fundraiser.

MERIDEN, Conn. — An analyst at the Connecticut Police Academy says a co-worker responded literally to her “bite me” remark and chomped on her.

Former Waterbury police Capt. Francis Woodruff was charged Tuesday with disorderly conduct and released on a promise to appear in court. He’s accused of biting academy license and applications analyst Rochelle Wyler on April 24.

A police arrest report says Wyler had teeth marks and bruising on the back of her left arm.

Wyler’s complaint alleges Woodruff was annoying her by calling her a clerk. She says she responded with “bite me” — and he did.

Woodruff also is a training coordinator with the 130-member police department in Meriden, just south of Hartford. He says he was joking around.

Via Greg Pollowitz at NRO Media Blog, we learn from the local Washington NBC affiliate that a group of kindergartners from Stafford County, Virginia were turned away at the gate on Thursday morning for being too late for their White House tour.

Parents say they were just 10 minutes late for the scheduled tour. School officials say White House staff said they needed to get ready for the president’s event with the Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, so they couldn’t come in.

“Here we have President Obama and his administration saying, ‘Here we are for the common, middle class people,’ and here he is not letting 150 5- and 6-year-olds into the White House because he’s throwing a lunch for a bunch of grown millionaires,” Stine said.

The person who headed this White House trip up came out and said, ‘I’m sorry, the White House tour’s off.’ There were a lot of crying kids,” parent Barbara Stine said….

Paty Stine said the White House staff should have made an exception. She feels the kindergarteners were snubbed for the Steelers.

Organizers of the visit from Conway Elementary said they left the school at 8:30, but ran into heavy traffic and were ten minutes late for a 10:15 appointment. White House officials told the local NBC affiliate a different story, that the students were expected at 9:30.

Anyone who lives in northern Virginia knows it would be foolish to only budget an hour to travel Interstate 95 in the morning rush hour from the northern outskirts of Fredericksburg and hope to arrive in downtown Washington. The White House story sounds fishy, although the school probably should have allowed even more time for the commute.

As the White House plans to reschedule after the small amount of embarrassing publicity, school officials are sounding very unperturbed by the snub. A quick Nexis search finds no national network coverage, not even NBC, and nothing in the Washington Post or Washington Times.

But when the smallest Bush boo-boo (like trying to open a locked door in Beijing) can be a major story, skipping this kind of story would demonstrate that network morning shows who love stuffing their broadcasts with light stories of interest to young moms are taking a pass to protect all the gooey Obama family public relations they’ve offered in the first 100 days and more.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center

After the event, President Obama went to the White House basketball court to shoot hoop with the Lady Huskies. The White House press corps was not allowed to attend.

Reads the print pool report from that day: “After shaking hands with the team’s parents and members of Congress who showed up, the president walked the team over to his basketball court and shot hoops. The pool was held back from the stroll down the drive and around the corner, and couldn’t see the court. Poolers could hear periodic cheering coming from the other side of the bushes.”

Read the TV pool report: “Your Pool was not allowed to go over and shoot POTUS with the team shooting hoops. We protested loudly.” Now we know why: Obama White House officials decided to do their own media report on the visit, complete with cuts, interviews, and chyrons identifying who’s speaking.

Also, just like a network, they have their own little logo!

Cute!

It’s perfectly fine, of course, for the White House to put out its own version of events — but is it right to do so by preventing actual reporters from covering something? (Even something like a pickup basketball game).

Is the goal to ultimately replace the pesky photographers who film what they want to and not what they’re told to (not to mention the annoying reporters who ask uncomfortable questions about, say, detainee policy and bank bailouts)?

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded a $2,227,500 grant to explore the possibility of inducing a hibernation-like state in “non-hibernating mammals” such as humans.

Cheng Chi Lee, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, is the main man behind the research.

Lee discovered that a particular molecule–the 5-prime adenosine monophosphate (5’-AMP) molecule–can induce a short hibernation-like state in mammals that do not normally hibernate. He said he is now trying to find ways to maintain that state long enough to perform major surgeries that could save human lives.Although he is currently conducting the research on mice, Lee told CNSNews.com that he eventually wants to translate his findings to clinical practice.

“That’s what I think all scientists’ goals are, basically,” he said.

When an animal hibernates, he explained, its cells are deprived of the oxygen it receives during its waking hours. The cells can better endure this low-oxygen state when the animal reaches a state of hypothermia and its metabolism slows.

Similarly, a heart attack or stroke starves an organ of its oxygen. According to Lee, physicians have long been using cooling procedures to help human cells survive these conditions.

“If you follow the ambulance services now in response to heart attack–the first response when you reach a heart attack patient is to bring the body temperature down as quickly as possible while the patient is being transported to the hospital,” Lee said.

“If you cool the body temperature down, then you expand the window of preventing ischemia [oxygen-shortage] damage. It’s really simple, because if the cell is cooled, it needs less oxygen.”

Lee said the same principle applies to organ transplants. When the organ donor and recipient live in different parts of the country, the organ is preserved in an ice cooler or other refrigeration system during transport.

“It’s purely in a cool state, and the reason is that, as you cool the cells down, the need for oxygen decreases dramatically,” Lee said.

“This has been going on for a long time,” he told CNSNews.com. “Doctors have recognized this wonderfulness of the cooling process, but the catch in this area is that the cooling process is very difficult. It’s not very efficient.

“My hope is that by looking at how the body responds to the ability to cool, we can, down the road, provide a system to enhance the process,” Lee said.

In essence, Lee’s research may make hypothermia and human “hibernation” into clinical tools.

“The induction of hypometabolism in cells and organs to reduce ischemia damage holds enormous clinical promise in diverse fields, including treatment of stroke and heart attack,” Lee wrote in the Annual Review of Medicine in 2008.

The NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, which is funding this research, awards $500,000 annually to each researcher for five years. By 2011, this project will have cost $2.5 million. Lee said he hopes to apply for more NIH grants to fund his research for at least five or 10 more years.

“It takes some time for any tools to become common practice,” Lee explained. “If we can get something to clinical usage within five years, then I think we have done very well. That would be my dream. Even 10 years, it will be a very good achievement.”